Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Remember the Charlestown Tank?

At one point, Charlestown once acquired some heavy duty militaryhardware, including a "tank." CLICK HERE for more detail.

The Trump administration made false assertions to justify an
executive order expanding police forces’ access to military equipment such as
tanks and grenade launchers.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Monday that
President Trump would make defensive gear available to police again by undoing
a policy from the Obama administration. Trump then signed an executive order whose title emphasized that
branding: “Restoring State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement’s Access to
Life-Saving Equipment and Resources.”

“He is rescinding restrictions from the prior administration
that limited your agencies’ ability to get equipment through federal programs,
including life-saving gear like Kevlar vests and helmets and first-responder
and rescue equipment like what they’re using in Texas right now,” Sessions said
in the speech.

But that’s not what the Obama administration’s restrictions did,
according to documentation from a unit inside of Sessions’ own
Justice Department, the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

Kevlar vests were never subject to any restrictions.Most
helmets weren’t, either. Riot helmets (defined as those with shields over the
face), Humvees and helicopters that are sometimes used in rescue missions, were
still available to police forces as long as they explained why they needed them
and certified that they had protocols and training in place so officers would
use them safely. That requirement was dropped for riot helmets last October.

“Kevlar vests were never on any lists. That part is simply lying
about what we did,” said Roy Austin, who worked on the Obama policy as a deputy
assistant to the president for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice and
Opportunity. “He was being untruthful about helmets as well.”

A Justice Department spokesman acknowledged that the items
Sessions cited were never prohibited by the Obama administration and that only
some of them were even subject to additional procedures. Still, the spokesman,
who did not want to be named, said: “There is absolutely nothing misleading
about what the Attorney General said.”

What the Obama administration did actually prohibit were tanks,
weaponized vehicles, .50 caliber guns, grenade launchers, bayonets and
digital-pattern camouflage uniforms. Those restrictions applied only to
purchases using federal dollars through a Pentagon surplus program. Police
departments remained free to buy them with state, local or private funds.

“The attorney general and whoever advised him on these policies
didn’t read them carefully and didn’t understand what they actually did,” said
Ed Chung, who worked on the Obama administration policies in the Justice
Department’s Office of Justice Programs. “The safety of officers was never
jeopardized because the overwhelming majority of equipment, including the ones
cited by the attorney general, were still available to law enforcement.”

The Obama administration implemented the restrictions in the spring of 2016 in response to
public concerns over the display of military-style hardware deployed by police
to control riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after an officer fatally shot Michael
Brown. Chung said the administration worked with civil rights organizations and
police groups in an effort to meet law enforcement agencies’ needs while
improving their relations with the communities they protect.

Sessions, in his speech, harshly dismissed such considerations.
“We will not put superficial concerns above public safety,” he said.

The attorney general asserted that the types of equipment
limited by the Obama administration saved an officer from a bullet at the Pulse
nightclub shooting in Orlando and helped police pursue the shooters in San
Bernardino. But that’s not accurate, either. As shown in the very articles that
Justice Department officials provided to reporters to support Sessions’ speech,
the Orlando officer’s helmet that blocked the bulletwasn’t a riot helmet, so it never
faced any restrictions. And the armored vehicles used in San Bernardino had
wheels, so the Obama policy still permitted them, with the additional precautions
described above. The Obama administration only prohibited buying tanks (armored
vehicles that run on tracks instead of wheels) using federal resources.

Sessions shared an anecdote in which a sheriff told him that the
Obama administration “made his department return an armored vehicle that can
change the dynamics of an active shooter situation.” The Obama administration
did ask those few departments that had tanks to return them, according to Chung
and Austin, but offered to replace them with equivalent wheeled vehicles.

“For every tracked vehicle, we replaced it with a wheeled
vehicle so they didn’t lose anything,” Austin said. “His anecdote makes no
sense because it skips the whole part that if they really needed this thing,
all they had to do was say we want a replacement and we’d provide a
replacement.”

Sessions’ anecdote referred to Sheriff Mike Bouchard of Oakland
County, Michigan, who is also vice president of government affairs for the
advocacy group Major County Sheriffs of America. In an interview, Bouchard
confirmed that the Obama administration replaced his tracked armored personnel
carrier with a wheeled one, but he said the wheeled version wasn’t as useful on
the sandy and marshy terrain he has in his county.

The Justice Department spokesman said the Obama administration’s
additional measures were onerous because departments had to demonstrate a “clear
and persuasive” need for the equipment, certify approval from a civilian
governing body and keep records of incidents when the equipment was used.

By repealing the Obama administration’s policy, the Trump
administration also abolished reporting procedures to help the government keep
better track of the equipment it distributes. The Government Accountability
Office recently tested the controls in the same program by creating a fake agency that
was able to obtain $1.2 million worth of night-vision goggles, and simulated
pipe bombs and other potentially lethal items.

“We viewed the Obama reforms as very modest,” said Kanya
Bennett, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re certainly
disappointed not only by the action that the administration took on Monday but
again in suggesting to the public that the previous administration had taken
away critical tools for law enforcement. In reality, there was very little that
the Obama administration did with respect to taking military weapons and
equipment out of rotation for state and local law enforcement use.”

Sessions’ speech cited studies showing that such equipment
reduces crime, assaults on officers and complaints against them. In the
materials provided to reporters, Justice Department officials pointed to a pair of studies in the
American Economic Journal. But those studies considered all equipment supplied
through the Pentagon’s surplus program, without distinguishing the items the
Obama administration restricted. They also studied the years 2006 to 2012,
before the Obama policies took effect.

“Our findings do not necessarily mean that saturating our local
law enforcement agencies with military hardware is good policy,” researchers at
the University of Tennessee wrote in one of the papers.
“These results should not be used to diminish concerns about police-community
relations, the role of police in our society, violence against civilians by
police, or vice versa.”

The other study observed that the type of equipment that had the
biggest effect on reducing crime was nonlethal non-military gear, such as computers and
office supplies. The researchers suspect that’s because those supplies free up
time and money for officers to spend on policing.

“There is a tendency to conflate military equipment with
weapons,” the lead researcher, Vincenzo Bove at the University of Warwick of
England, told ProPublica in an email. “Whereas we find that weapons is an
unproductive category (it does not significantly affect crime) the
miscellaneous category has the strongest effect, followed by vehicles and
gear.”

“We do not explore the effect on crime of the items prohibited
under the Obama policy,” Bove added. “But, as most of the prohibited items were
weapons, note they do not seem to have (in aggregate) any effect on crime.”

Sessions announced the change of policy at a meeting of the
Fraternal Order of Police, which viewed repealing
the Obama-era restrictions as one of its top-priority asks for the Trump
administration. “The previous administration was more concerned about the image
of law enforcement being too ‘militarized’ than they were about our safety,”
the organization’s president, Chuck Canterbury, said in a statement.

But not all police groups agree. The Obama policy was sensible
to restrict non-essential lethal equipment like bayonets and to encourage police
to consult local elected officials before acquiring equipment that could be
controversial, said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation and a
retired police chief in Redlands, California.

“The Obama executive order represented a best practice for
acquiring military surplus equipment for local policing, and I still think it
could serve and should serve as a best practice even though the rules have
changed,” he said. “I was supportive of the overarching goals of the previous
executive order, but I also understand what this president is trying to do. I
view this through the lens of a police chief, and I would say to my city
manager and council, ‘Ignore all of this that’s the federal government’s
activity — under both sets of rules, we should still go to the public to
explain our rationale.’”